Thousands of demonstrators have marched through the Turkish port city of Istanbul to commemorate the anniversary of the anti-government protests that swept across the Anatolian country in 2013.

Demonstrators took to the streets of central Istanbul on Wednesday, as they displayed banners reading “Continue to Resist.” And families carried portraits of their loved ones killed in what became known as the Gezi Park protests in 2013.

Hundreds of riot police forces, armed with batons and shields, blocked Istiklal Street in Istanbul’s Beyoglu district to prevent the demonstrators from convening around the Gezi Park, located in the vicinity of Taksim Square.

The demonstration was, nevertheless, held almost entirely in peace, and no report of clashes between police and marchers was released.

On May 28, 2013, hundreds of pro-environment people held a sit-in in protest against an urban development plan to uproot trees in the park and rebuild an Ottoman-era barracks and other buildings on the land of Gezi Park, which is one of the few remaining green spaces in Istanbul. The barracks had originally been built in 1789 and was torn down in the 1940.

The peaceful sit-in protesters, however, were violently evicted by riot police, which generated outrage among people. Soon, other protests were held in the city and a domino effect created some 5,000 supporting demonstrations across the country during the next two weeks.

The theme of the nationwide anti-government rallies went beyond the initial demands and began to include a wide range of concerns, at the core of which were issues of freedom of the press, of expression and assembly, and a condemnation of the purported authoritarianism of the then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.